Since 1984, academic essays addressing the public rhetorics of science and technology have embodied at least four purposes: theory-building, discounting scientific representations, deprecating scientific influence, and strategizing to improve the efficacy of scientific rhetorics. Some of these purposes are in conflict with each other, but there has been little explicit discussion about the purposes for ARST studies. This essay argues in favor of a synthetic vision that places humanistic, social scientific, and natural science endeavors as part of an over-lapping set of practices, each of which demonstrably makes distinctive positive contributions to globalizing human consciousness. The essay argues that the few existing studies illustrate how increased internationalism in ARST studies is not only important in its own right, but also could provide one academic route for expanding the imagined relational possibilities among humanistic "critics," the natural or social sciences, and broader societies.

This essay discusses the major themes that emerged as part of an Octavian roundtable discussion on the topics of science, publics and controversy at the Association of Rhetoric of Science and Technologies’ (ARST) 2012 Vicentennial preconference. Participants expressed interest in developing research exploring the differing scales and types of scientific controversies and the roles that rhetoricians might play as interveners in public disagreements on techno-scientific issues. Participants also explored the emerging phenomenon—such as the role of the internet in facilitating interaction between lay publics, science, and scientists—that they believed would provide fertile sites of investigation for scholars in rhetoric and communication interested in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.

This introduction to the Association for the Rhetoric of Science & Technology’s (ARST) twentieth anniversary special issue of Poroi reflects on the inventional resources for scholarship concerning the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM). After previewing the essays in the special issue, it outlines four questions facing RSTM scholars. These questions concern how to discern the purposes of our scholarship, how to reach the multiple audiences for our work, how to use multiple methods while retaining our rhetorical core, and how to orient our work theoretically. The essay concludes by briefly discussing how these questions present both challenges and opportunities for future RSTM inquiry and engagement.

A review of work being published in our journals establishes that we most often think of ourselves as passive intellectuals, engaged in critical reflection about rhetorics of science and technology. But another persona lurks in that scholarship as well—the rhetorician as agent of change making the world a better place. This paper argues that rhetoricians of science and technology need to think harder about how we take the academic understandings developed in our primary internal discursive genre and transform them into productive engagements with external publics. Whether we encounter those publics in the classroom or in civic forums or in scientific or technical organizations, we need to be able to translate our research findings to these empowered stakeholders in ways that are meaningful and constructive. By sharing best practices for pedagogy and public engagement, rhetoricians of science and technology can improve our chances of making an impact with our research.

Condit, Prelli, and Depew and Lyne offer useful taxonomies of scholarship in the rhetoric of science, technology and medicine (RSTM), and once again provoke questions about the distinctiveness of a rhetorical approach. Rhetorical studies examine the choices rhetors make at all levels of invention (e.g., lines of argument, arrangement, terminology, visuals). But rhetoricians have not been clear in defining the distinctive contribution of their approach, and scholars in related fields do not routinely access or acknowledge rhetorical studies. There are also impediments to framing rhetorical studies for scientists and practitioners: the term rhetoric still has negative connotations in science publications, and rhetorical concepts like cooperation and reputation are addressed by other fields, creating a competing discourse. Nevertheless, RSTM will expand, and new directions for scholarship include visual rhetoric and the new persuasive practices brought about by online publication.

The future of the rhetoric of science—which will increasingly take the form of a rhetoric of technology, science, and medicine (RTSM)—will be shaped by its move away from its modernist, humanistic roots in response to institutional pressures and historical contingencies. This paper advocates a “praxiographical” emphasis on the ability to intervene in science policy and other STEM-related discourses for the field of RTSM. It describes four research foci emerging from this emphasis to be used as areas of programmatic concern at an Institute for Applied Rhetoric of Science and Sustainability at the newly organized Patel College of Global Sustainability at the University of South Florida.

Scholarship concerning visual representations in science, technology, and medicine is in a preliminary phase. This essay surveys selected areas where visually-oriented rhetorical studies of science, technology and medicine are emerging. It examines the relationships between visual and verbal dimensions of scientific, technical, and medical texts; raises questions concerning the appropriateness of using concepts from the linguistic tradition to analyze visuals; and outlines fruitful areas for further study, ranging from studies of the truth-value of images through public communication about visualizations.

This brief article examines the scholarship of propaedeutics, which is involved when teasing meaning from cutting-edge scientific and technological fields that are often in flux. Because these fields are plagued with uncertainty, mired in shifting jargon, highly controversial, and often politicized, the scholar who studies these areas must build texts in order to approach the claims and counterclaims made by proponents and opponents and offer rhetorical critical insight. The term fringe science is used to describe three sub-fields that have been the subject of work by the author and his team. Nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and geo-engineering are three highly interdisciplinary technological fields that offer many opportunities for rhetoricians of science and technology as well as pose risks. To critique them demands a basic understanding of what they are and what they purport to be.

This paper recommends three general lines of inquiry concerning rhetorical invention as alternative ways to advance work in rhetorical studies of science, technology, and medicine. One line of inquiry involves the study of the creative processes and imaginative practices involved in the invention of perspectives in discourses of and about science, technology, and medicine. This line of inquiry is elaborated with attention to the master tropes, dramatism, argument, and visual representations. The second general line of inquiry involves identification, analysis, and critique of the commonplaces that are deployed as authoritative in discourses about purportedly “expert” matters. The third line of inquiry concerns articulation of the distinctive place of a rhetorical perspective, informed by an emphasis on invention, in cross-disciplinary projects involving science, technology and medicine.

This essay argues that rhetoricians of health of medicine should continue to carve out an expansive focus on the exigencies, functions, and impacts of health-related discourse; attend to the movement, surrounding networks, and ecologies of this discourse; and work with other scholars/researchers, both inside and outside disciplinary rhetorical studies, toward a variety of goals.

Defining the “rhetoric of technology” encounters the challenges scholars have identified when defining both “rhetoric” and “technology,” and it raises issues about how to demarcate the rhetoric of technology from media studies and other cognate fields. One distinguishing feature of both rhetoric and technology is the focus on invention. Giving priority to invention highlights the liminal positionality of a rhetoric of technology, which lies betwixt and between science and commerce, and novelty and familiarity. Considering invention further encourages interdisciplinary reflexivity about the decisions made in technological development and dissemination.

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is widely recognized as the worst oil spill in international history (Oceana: Protecting the World's Oceans, n.d.). Within days of the April 20, 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig that had killed 11 people, remote underwater cameras revealed the BP pipe was leaking oil and gas on the ocean floor about 42 miles off the coast of Louisiana ( National Museum of Natural History, n.d.). Since the explosion, teams of researchers and scientists have begun studying the disaster and its impacts.

In this analysis of the intelligent design theory textbook, Of Pandas and People, I seek a better understanding of how the authors propose intelligent design as a legitimate science. By looking at this text through the rhetorical concept of imitation, I show how the authors attempt to validate the text for uses in public education classrooms. In doing this, the authors of the text attempt to imitate science, scientists and science textbooks, but do so in ways that reveal their teleological position to the scientific and legal community and alienate their creationist progenitors.

Our lived worlds are systematized technologies that organize the information that to inform themselves about subjects as diverse as politics or energy consumption

Volume 8, No 1, of POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Analysis and Invention, offers three essays and, in accord with our practice, summaries of the Proceedings of 2011 Preconference of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (ARST).

Rhetoric enters into economics frequently at the junctures of alternative government policies and debates grounding competing theories of unexpected events and prudent solutions.When economies turn in widely unanticipated directions, critical discussions arise to spark questions about the legitimacy, power, and correctness of policy response.In October 1932, there appeared in The Times of London a series of brief letter exchanges signed by John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich August von Hayek (along with some of their associates) in which alternative explanations were defended about the causes of economic activity.Those explanations were grounded in macro-and microeconomics, which in the terms of the 1930s were contested as trade cycle or monetary theories (Rizzo, 2009).Also at issue, however, was a choice between alternative strategies of political economy.Nineteen thirty-two appeared to be a time of nascent recovery from the effects of falling equity values, but also could be seen as the beginning of a new era of trade protectionism and monetary contraction.One policy choice was for governments to distribute tax or printed money to citizens in the form of unemployment insurance or guaranteed employment programs to supplement private spending.Another was for governments to exercise restraint in borrowing and spending and let private capital adjust economies to new productive levels by securing good investments over time.While the subsequent decisions of the British government conformed to neither choice unequivocally, the events of the Great Depression that followed have at various times been appropriated by Hayek and Keynes' successors as evidence that the theoretical arguments of one or other have been vindicated by collective experience.The present day is another time in which theoretical controversy and alternative practices are conjoined.Named by some as "the Great Recession," the period that began in 2008 has seen accelerating rates of defaults on loan repayments, job layoffs, financial institutional distress, and speculative shortselling of sovereign debt.But this moment has also

Few popular science news articles today attract as much attention or are communicated with as much flamboyance as those involving the neurosciences. Catchy but charged headlines such as "Obese Teens May Be Lacking in Brain Size, Not Willpower" These popular accounts present rhetoric scholars with numerous opportunities for interrogating scientific understandings of the brain and their development through the discourses, practices, and materials of neuroscience. However, a strictly deconstructive approach, as Bruno Latour (2004) notes, can be viewed as intellectually hostile to the efforts of scientific researchers (p. 225-228). Because neuroscience is a relatively new and diverse field, it is important to

Contrary to critics and scholars interested in the series’ therapeutic value, Harry Potter encourages post-9/11 subjects to neither heal nor mourn. Instead of taking up the potential pain and transformation in realizing and coming to terms with the deaths of his parents, Harry’s reattachment to the institution precludes his abilities to mourn constructively and his orphanhood effectively gets effaced over the course of the series. This article suggests that the therapeutic value ascribed to Harry Potter indicates a hope that it will serve as a pedagogical device to produce loyal, patriotic citizen-subjects that will hold on to rather than mourn loss.

As the U.S. population both increases and ages over the next 40 years, the numbers of patients requiring healthcare for both crisis-oriented and chronic conditions will grow in tandem (USHHS, 2009). This growth requires that healthcare practitioners and patients master new methodologies for communicating about care. Among these methodological possibilities are new and social media, such as websites, mobile phone text messaging, interactive websites, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Here, communication and rhetoric of science scholars can help shape the future efficacy of Web 2.0 healthcare communication and the strategies its practitioners use toward patient activation.

From fundamentalist views that wish to ban the books for their use of magic, to perspectives that the books are a modern-day expression of good Christianity, controversy around the rhetorical implications of faith in Harry Potter has become critical to the culture of the book. With its focus on these questions of religious rhetoric in Rowling’s texts, this article centers specifically on the theological thread that runs through C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Harry Potter series. Lewis’s deeply embedded use of the trilemma “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?” — the question that haunts Narnia as Edmund plays the Judas to Aslan’s existence and resurrection — also winds its way through the unfolding plot of the Harry Potter series. Rowling’s narrative, however, takes its own rhetorical path. Defying and confusing traditionally stark boundaries between good and evil, mortal and immortal, Harry Potter is not the tidy story of clear ideological divisions. Rather, Rowling’s use of Lewis’s trilemma serves to complicate and illustrate the dialectic of faith and doubt, as well as the moral complexities of “good” and “evil,” in order to address an audience not necessarily Christian, but decidedly human.

The discoveries of science and technology are accelerating. The choice of how to regulate and react to scientific and technological innovations relies heavily on the notion of risk. The emergence nature contemporary science and technology (i.e., complex systems that are not reducible to the simple physical and chemical processes from which they arose) confounds risk studies Indeed, whether to embark on a particular path of scientific inquiry or proceed with a technological development depends on the ability to calculate the amount of risk associated with the endeavor. We are, however, ill-equipped to resolve the demands of risk analysis with certainty.

In 2003, the U.S. Air University published “The Role of Rhetorical Theory in Military Intelligence Analysis: A Soldier’s Guide to Rhetorical Theory” written by Air Force Major Gary H. Mills. In this essay, Mills argues that the rhetorical theory of French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault “serves as a powerful military-intelligence force multiplier.” Foucault is described by Mills as a “reluctant, unintentional military tactician.” Likening Foucault’s rhetorical theory to a weapon used by a combat force might strike rhetorical and critical scholars as bizarre given Foucault’s theoretical and political project. Therefore, in this essay, I attempt to understand the meaning and accuracy of Major Mills’s claim, as well as consider the broader implications of Foucault’s rhetorical theory in relation to U.S. intelligence and national security organizing.

In 1909, photographer and social

1 Global governance and human rights have rarely been considered in relation to each another. Here I explore their connections with special attention to the rhetoric of international justice. The result is an argument that combining these two sets of perspectives can give us a better understanding of global politics. 2 I begin by showing what perspectives of global governance can offer those of us who have taken traditional approaches to human rights. Then I turn things around to discuss what perspectives of human rights can add to previous treatments of global governance. To illustrate how they can complement each other, I analyze the problematical "Pinochet precedent." And to project politics where global governance and human rights learn from each other, I conclude by relating global governance to two competing perspectives on international justice.

If we are to believe Cicero’s reports in his Brutus, sentimental discourses were a staple of Roman legal and legislative proceedings. For example, he praised Servius Sulpicius Galba as an orator “who inflames the court, ” thus accomplishing “far more than the one who merely instructs it. ” When charged with massacring Lusitanians, “with tears in his eyes [Galba] commended to [the Roman people’s] protection his own children as well as the young son of Gaius Gallus. The presence of this orphan and his childish weeping excited great compassion ” (xxii, 89-90), and of course Galba was acquitted. Even casual readers of the Iliad discover speeches full of invective (Achilles ’ rage), patriotic encomium (Hector’s battle cry), and sententious disquisitions on the nature of life, love, death, and sociality (Achilles ’ vision of Patroclus). These can unify a people around sentiments of duty, patriotism, fidelity, and amity (books 1, 12, and

The crowd is buzzing, and not just because everyone's getting drunk. In the lobby of the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, about 300 investor relations professionals are gorging themselves on wine, beer and hors d'oeuvres while anxiously wait to be allowed into the IMAX dome theatre for privately arranged screening of one of the most talked about movies of the year: Everest.

1 It is time for a little tutorial on ethos.A word tour, this is not, for the neighboring terms get too little attention.But even in broad outline, few words can have more telling careers than ethos, and it is under the aegis of ethos that this issue of Poroi comes together.2 Ethos was the word in ancient Greek for character.This classical kind of character is rhetorical and public rather than psychological and internal, as was character for the Victorians.Classical ethos is the standing of the speaker for the audience.Not just any old audience is at issue, but specifically a classical public, where the members take full parts in collaborating to manage the commonwealth.The classical public is oratorical, not dialogical; still the members take turns in speaking and acting at center stage.In the ancient sense, therefore, ethos is who somebody is in speech in action in public -as told by an audience experienced in many of the same politics. 1The specific identities of classical characters stay alive for their publics in stories that judge the virtues and vices while suggesting how people should act toward each other: the province of what we call ethics. 2 3 This explains how Aristotle could recognize ethos as a legitimate mode of persuasion comparable to logos as logic and pathos as mobilization of emotions. 3The ancient emphasis on virtue in character might well have made ethos as important as either logos or pathos in classical persuasion.To know from sustained interaction the character who advances some claim can be to know an enormous amount about what to make of it.4 Yet classical publics are too small and intimate for modern polities.The invention of civil society gradually turns participation away from government.It also truncates oratorical voices into electoral votes.Especially it shrinks classical ethos to modern credentials or, at most, credibility.Alasdair MacIntyre has lamented how the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries put all diverse, plural virtues into a singular template of virtue. 4That led

1 In the ashen smoke of airliners crashing, glass shattering, and steel evaporating, visions of internationalism and safety become difficult to see. Bright images of progress and globalism yield to clouds of terror and trouble. Radical Muslims have declared war on America: this "fact," the pictures of Muslims cheering Osama Bin Laden, and the celebratory gestures of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein crowded out images of mourning Arabs. Photographs of Yassir Arafat giving blood to help the New York City victims got little play. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Samuel Huntington's oft-challenged claim of an inevitable Clash of Civilizations (1996) between a Muslim East and a Christian West swung back into fashion. 2 In pronouncing this rupture between East and West, media commentators often name the Iranian Revolution as the first fullblown demonstration of Islamist radicalism. Revolutionary discourse from the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s and from activist Sayyid Qutb in Egypt predated the Iran Revolution. Yet events in Iran involved a prophetic discourse that discounted Arab leaders as infidels and indicted Western society as corrupt. When Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda echoed these charges, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian Revolution, and the seizure of American hostages emerged as the first figures of Islamic unrest recognized by most Americans. Together these form much of the background that popular media cite for the Attack on America. 3 The rhetorical fount of Islamist ideology in Iran was the Ayatollah Khomeini. Through Friday sermons and occasional writings, he discredited the U.S.-imposed monarchy of the Shah as illegitimate. Widely read in revolutionary Iran, his treatise on Islamic Government ( Velayat-e Faqih) has become the foundation for the post-revolutionary society. Rose portrays Khomeini as the one figure responsible for "the restructuring of the personal and social consciousness of Muslims into an

In line with the old Quaker adage, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend,” our response reflected an uneasy alliance of disparate elements that, on other occasions, would have been at odds. In his current piece, not surprisingly, Simons exploits some of the internal disagreements that had to be papered over to face the common foe of rhetorical globalization. Here I break cover and write exclusively under my own name. 3 For didactic purposes, though, let me begin by highlighting one defining tension in our original response to Simons. Perhaps this is represented best by comparing Michael Leff to Alan Gross. Both defend rhetorical protectionism, but on radically different ― even mutually opposed ― grounds. 4 Leff draws on criteria of legitimate lineage: Rhetoric is whatever can be shown to have descended from the classical tradition of public address. As might be expected of a family whose members have bred freely over many centuries, there are many mongrels along the way. Leff holds that it is possible nevertheless, on relatively strict genealogical grounds, to say that certain ideas or

NCA-affiliated rhetoric, as they see it, is under threat from within and without the field of communication studies. 3 That my review should have been singled out for their expression of disciplinary angst stems apparently from my enthusiasm for rhetoric's increasing globalization and for my failure to appreciate how that intellectual movement further undermines NCA-rhetoric's already weakened position relative to its real and imagined rivals. But much that I had to say in the review essay in support of a globalized conception of rhetoric and of an expanded role for civically oriented rhetoricians goes unaddressed by my colleagues. Of central concern to them are issues of

1 Relationships between popular culture and dominant systems of power can emerge more clearly in crisis than in routine times. Powerful economic and political forces attempted to use 9/11 as a rationale to discipline popular culture. Here I examine how this happened and how it spurred a form of at least provisional cultural resistance. I look at two instances of attempted repression of popular culture that occurred post-911 and at how the success of each was limited by popular cultural reactions against it.

1 Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, socialists could claim they had done a better job of uniting theory and practice than capitalists. Socialists had generally succeeded in raising the welfare of the bottom end of their societies, typically at the cost of lowering it at the top end. And that is exactly as the socialists would have wanted it. For, even if not all socialists held the rich personally responsible for the plight of the poor, all were in agreement that the rich constituted a structural obstacle in the struggle to overcome mass poverty. In contrast, capitalists have found it more difficult to square their own theory and practice. In theory, everyone should flourish with the liberalization of markets. Yet, in practice, even when the poor increased their income, it was never enough to catch up with the increases in wealth made by the rich. The result was an intensification of existing class divisions, or "relative deprivation," which capitalist theorists could only attempt to explain away by invoking such ad hoc factors as the lack of a work ethic among the poor or the unpredictability of markets. Poroi, 1, 1, January, 2001 can be added through will and effort to one's genetic endowment. In this sense, Singer remains deaf to the quest for recognition, at least in the human species and probably others as well.

The Unity of Knowledge seeks to persuade readers to integrate knowledge "from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities." 1 Wilson's stated intent is to offer the "strongest appeal" for the linkage of the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities, an appeal based on "the prospect of intellectual adventure and, given even modest success, the value of understanding the human condition with a higher degree of certainty" (WC, 9). He believes that the biological sciences have much to say about the human condition, and that only by breaching "the boundary that separates the natural sciences on one side from the humanities and humanistic social sciences on the other" can we begin to truly understand human social behavior (WC, 125). In short, the connection that links the "deep, mostly genetic history of the species as a whole to the more recent cultural histories of its far-flung societies" is something that should be further explored by scientists willing to cross disciplinary boundaries (WC, 126).